Women's Studies Group Workshop 2010
Keynote Speaker:
Professor Jane Spencer
‘The link which unites man with brutes’: Enlightenment feminism, women and animals
Download a registration form here
Followed by informal discussion and exchange of information on the themes of
Women * Enlightenment * Science *Feminism *late eighteenth-century *Animals *Literature
Professor Jane Spencer’s research expertise is in literature 1660-1830, especially the novel; women's literary history; feminist criticism; and currently the relationship between animal and human in the Enlightenment. She has published influential works in her field with her polemical contributions to feminist literary history: The Rise of the Woman Novelist, 1986 and Aphra Behn’s Afterlife, 2000. She has also written on 'kinship' in the narrative of literary history (Literary Relations, 2005); feminist criticism (editor, Political Gender, 1994) and literature and culture throughout the eighteenth-century and Romantic period. Recently she has completed work on Jane Austen (Blackwell's Companion). Her talk at this year’s Women’s Studies Group annual workshop will draw from her current research project on Enlightenment Animals: a study of the way Enlightenment thinking shaped attitudes to and representations of animals in the period. The aim of her project is to bring together eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century philosophy, science, religious writing, poetry, novels and children's literature in a bid to uncover the way the relationship between human and non-human animals was reconceived.